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9 Ways Skype Professional Network Helps SMBs

There's a new professional network on the block: Skype in the Workspace. Here are 9 reasons it's worth a look for small businesses and other users.

Take a spin through Skype in the Workspace (SITW), a new networking site for businesses and professionals, and it looks suspiciously like social media. It features connections, favorites, testimonials and profile pages. Then there are the requisite integrations with sites like Twitter and LinkedIn.

All these features should look and feel familiar to social butterflies. Yet the folks at Skype aren't really calling the new platform a social network. That might be a smart move to avoid the risk of social fatigue -- after all, do we really need another social site?

No matter what they call it, SITW adds a decidedly social component to the company's existing video, voice, chat, and SMS applications. I was drawn to it because it's intended for business users, especially small business users. (Note that there's nothing stopping anyone and everyone from using the site, though it doesn't offer much for personal use.)

I like what I see so far. The site is clean and easy to use. There seem to be limitless possibilities for the kinds of "opportunities" you can create or find. Opportunities, the lifeblood of the site, are basically pitches or queries that users post in hopes of connecting with other users who are interested in what they have to say. (Sound familiar?)

But rather than simply generating the longest possible list of connections, which may or may not have any real meaning or value, SITW is designed to facilitate actual meetings between businesspeople. Skype, of course, already has the video and voice calling tools in place to make those meetings happen. Once users connect via an opportunity, they become Skype contacts as well.

SITW might be particularly well-suited to global-minded businesses given Skype's international footprint, though that's by no means a requirement. A tip: If you're interested in meeting with people from only certain countries or continents, say so in the opportunity description to help ensure you're connecting with people in the right markets.

The site's visible weakness currently is simply that there are a limited number of users and opportunities. No great surprise there; Skype might be old hat, but SITW is brand new. While the potential applications of the opportunity framework are reasonably limitless (as long as they're legal), they're a bit heavy on the promotional side at the moment. Nothing wrong with sales -- no business survives without them -- but it will be interesting to see what other types of opportunities arise as the site expands.

As with any community, much depends on its members. Skype had 500 small businesses participate in the closed beta. The company said it expects the community to quickly grow into the thousands now that it's generally available. That growth will be critical to address the lack of breadth and depth of the available opportunities. If you're looking for a reason to believe that improvement will come, here's one: 280 million people already actively use Skype services every month.

As the Skype in the Workspace base grows, it seems likely that it will develop its own culture and unwritten codes of conduct. I can imagine, for example, an uncertain science developing around how to create compelling opportunities. Nitty-gritty variables such as selecting a proposed meeting duration might be fodder for future best-practice recommendations.

In the meantime, Skype in the Workspace is worth a serious look from business users, especially those who are already using Skype at work. Here are nine ways in which I think SITW could help SMBs -- or any business-minded users.

While Skype charges for services such as Skype-to-phone calling, Skype in the Workspace, like most social networks, is free to join and use. There's not much downside to giving it a try, especially if you're already using Skype and social sites like LinkedIn and Twitter at work. There's plenty of upside in Skype's huge user community, particularly the millions-strong segment that uses Skype for business. In fact, you don't even need a Skype account to try it -- you can sign in with your LinkedIn credentials.

Skype users actually use the service. I signed in while writing this and found some 44 million people online; that's a representative fraction of the 280 million people, give or take, who use Skype each month. While Skype can't point to a specific number of people who use the platform for business, it estimates that it's easily in the millions. Skype in the Workspace helps you find those folks in one place and interact with them as an audience -- something that wasn't particularly easy to do before. "What this enables you to do is tap into that Skype network and make that instant connection," said Ural Cebeci, Skype's head of SMB marketing, in an interview.

Skype in the Workspace content will be searchable online. The opportunities you create -- which form the core feature of the platform -- will appear in relevant search results on Google, Bing, and elsewhere. So, too, will user profile pages. For example, an opportunity created by beta user Mark Ralphs, of the UK-based digital strategy firm Ralphs McIntosh and Partners, appears on page one of a Google search for "Mark Ralphs consultant" -- right alongside his company's homepage and one of its Slideshare presentations. Related searches produce similar results, with SITW mixed in among the firm's Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Quora and other online presences. SEO junkies, take note.

Whereas sites like Quora and, to a lesser extent, Twitter tend to frown upon overt sales and marketing spiels, Skype encourages them out of the gate. Scroll through the opportunities on the home page -- Skype curates the appearance of that content -- and you'll find that most of them are pitches for products and services. If Skype in the Workspace succeeds in building an engaged community of business professionals -- and that's still a big if at this point -- it could become a significant source of leads, especially for businesses that sell to other businesses.

Those leads become even more valuable when the initial connection becomes an actual conversation facilitated by Skype's video, voice, and other communications. For businesses, online connections (or followers or fans) often stay in the realm of the relatively anonymous and not particularly useful. If you've ever felt like your social business activities aren't all that, well, social, then the Skype model -- which encourages initial connections to pursue follow-up meetings via video conference or voice call -- should hold a great deal of appeal.

Making connections doesn't only have to mean sales. The online era makes it easier than ever for smaller companies to pursue strategic partnership opportunities all over the world. The same holds true for finding and vetting suppliers, vendors, distributors and related entities. Skype's ability to foster fast meetings with potential partners and gauge whether there's a potential fit from strategic and cultural perspectives could prove far more productive than surfing websites or trading faceless emails.

The virtual, mobile workforce has forced HR pros and hiring managers to rethink the traditional face-to-face interview. That led to the rise of the Skype interview -- a common occurrence in hiring situations these days when the employer and the candidate aren't located in the same area. Skype in the Workspace seems to offer a natural extension of that function; hiring managers and recruiters could easily turn an opportunity into a job opportunity, soliciting meetings with prospective talent.

The bottom-line instinct might be to always push opportunities out to the community in search of customers, partners, employees and so on. But opportunities might work just as well as a way of asking questions or seeking help with business challenges. That's not unlike how someone might tweet a business-related question, or post it in a relevant LinkedIn Group, or ask it on Quora. But Skype has the added benefit of being able to connect people directly via video and voice. That removes a degree of anonymity, lets you see and hear who is answering your question, and adds more humanity to the process. Questions are natural conversation starters.

While the launch version of Skype in the Workspace has a decidedly sales-y bent, the opportunity template is wide open in terms of use cases. As the number of active business users grows, it seems likely that more people will use it simply as a way to connect with other people in business contexts. You might look for a speaker for one of your company's conference panels, for example, or someone to play guinea pig for a new product or market idea. It seems possible to apply the opportunity rubric to a vast number of jobs and business tasks. Here's one close to home, or at least the home office: I can use Skype in the Workspace to find good interview sources for stories I'm writing.